The real cost of moral-vanity, of name-calling, poor reasoning, selecting ones evidence, and the triumph of doing things because they feel-good rather than because of the cold hard numbers, is measured in the trillions. This disaster was entirely foreseeable, totally predictable, and completely unnecessary.

Thanks to Benny Peiser and The Australian, the utter folly is laid bare.

AS country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realise that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities.

Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening to a green energy crisis, an economic and political debacle that is entirely self-inflicted.

The media is finally starting to do what it should have done ten years ago:

A study by British public relations consultancy CCGroup analysed 138 articles about renewables published during July last year in the five most widely circulated British national newspapers: The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which enjoy a combined daily circulation of about 6.5 million.

The analysis revealed a number of trends in the reporting of renewable energy news, the study found. First and foremost, the temperature of the medias sentiment toward the renewables industry is cold. More than 51 per cent of the 138 articles analysed were either negative or very negative toward the industry.

The flagrantly wasted resources are simply obscene:

EU members states have spent about 600 billion ($882bn) on renewable energy projects since 2005, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Germanys green energy transition alone may cost consumers up to 1 trillion by 2030, the German government recently warned.

That this kind of waste and mismanagement should have occurred under Western Governments when the financial nonsense of it was obvious long before the money was spent, stands as an argument against Big-Government and a warning of where gullible Green economics leads. Real people have toiled fruitlessly across Europe to pay for these ridiculous schemes. Their quality of life reduced by the failure of big-government, of mentally weak, ethically bankrupt academics, of poorly trained overconfident poseur journalists.

Germany is a Green basketcase:

Germans electricity bills have doubled since 2000. (Germans pay about 40c a KWH.)

Up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because they couldnt pay their bills.

Germanys renewable energy levy rose from 14bn to 20bn in one year as wind and solar expanded. German households will pay a renewables surcharge of 7.2bn this year alone.

Germany has more than half the worlds solar panels. They generated 40% of Germanys peak electricity demand on June 6, but practically 0% during the darkest weeks of winter.

Seimens closed its entire solar division, losing about 1bn. Bosch is getting out too, it has lost about 2.4bn.

Solar investors have lost almost about 25bn in the past year. More than 5,000 companies associated with solar have closed since 2010.

Germany has phased out nuclear, but is adding 20 coal fired stations. Gas power cant compete with cheap coal or subsidized renewables and 20% of gas power plants are facing shutdown.

Despite the river of money paid to renewables, emissions have risen in Germany for the last two years.

In Spain more than 5,000 solar entrepreneurs face bankruptcy without the subsidies.

EU leaders now officially list affordable energy as being more important than greenhouse emissions.

None of this even counts the flow-on effects of expensive energy  how much was lost from European manufacturing which could not compete? Investors are pouring money into the US, where energy prices have fallen to one-third of those in the EU, thanks to the shale gas revolution.

This is burning money on a scale that only Big-Government can manage, misdirected malinvestment so successful that we can only guess how many people have lost jobs, lost years of work, and in the case of homes without electricity, lost lives.

Well, looks like they built it, and no one came. Or at least none of the promises came to fruition. Our western civilization has reached the fantasy phase and we will soon fall into the death spiral phase. All thanks to idiot ideologues.

This si just another chapter in Charles Mackay's infamous book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". As they say "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it". This book should be mandatory reading for junior high and again in high school, good lessons bear repeating.

14
posted on 08/10/2013 10:27:52 AM PDT
by fella
("As it was before Noah, so shall it be again,")

A cousin in CA fell into the globull warming scam and devoted his business to it. When ever I send him an email with this info he blast me saying “why would you send this to someone who sells solar panels for a living?”.

Real people have toiled fruitlessly across Europe to pay for these ridiculous schemes. Their quality of life reduced by the failure of big-government, of mentally weak, ethically bankrupt academics, of poorly trained overconfident poseur journalists.

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